Warmwell.com
Inquiries may be addressed to Mary Critchley at warmwell
In 2007 Bernard Vallat, the Director General of the OIE www.oie.int: said that the cost of preventing crises is insignificant compared "to the social, economic and environmental cost of disasters resulting from epizootics, such as BSE, foot and mouth disease and highly pathogenic avian influenza."
- And as Roger Breeze said in Manchester in 2006, ".... We can protect and improve the health of livestock and the economic security of people all over the world by applying the ingenuity and focus of the private sector to seemingly intractable international animal disease problems of the highest importance for which solutions would have lasting global benefits.
It is in the self-interest and national security of developed nations to assist in global disease eradication to protect their own economies against natural infection and terrorist attacks, to promote economic development and unrestricted trade, to complement new global public health programs and to reduce hunger and poverty. ..." Read in full
www.warmwell.com
"This website has served as a
rapier, puncturing the bladder of Government obfuscation, by publishing a
highly informed, topical digest of news..." Country Life editorial
Mary Critchley
From Private Eye - August 17-30 2007
" If the media in general floundered in their attempts to understand what was going on, at least one comprehensive source of information has been available to anyone wanting to follow in detail the convolutions of this latest episode. One of the few bright spots of that dark time in 2001 was the website www.warmwell.com , run from near Bordeaux by an expatriate English teacher, Mary Critchley. Within weeks she had established warmwell as the most reliable clearing-house for expert information on the FMD crisis, and miraculously, having made contact with all the most authoritative scientists in the field, she has remained in business ever since. Yet again in recent days, Miss Critchley has been working overtime, telling us a great deal more than we learn from the BBC."
Filed 07 Feb 2006 )www.land-care.org.uk Editorial
"Readers of
www.land-care.org.uk are encouraged to read www.warmwell.com, which has done so much over the
years for the cause of applying
good science to major health problems that threaten our nation's livestock...."
From a seminar paper, Stockholm Conference 2002
Warmwell.com - "The site
is text only and is organized on a day to day basis... It was and is a tool of public information that addresses or
rather services a massive debate beginning in Britain...."
P.B Stone former Senior Information Advisor to the Secretary
General of UNCHE (United Nations Conference on the Human Environment)
From Country Life - Dec 19th 2002 - Editorial
"Anyone who has wanted up-to-the-minute, authoritative
information on the foot-and-mouth outbreak, in all its administrative chaos and
rural horror, could find it at the click of a mouse, by visiting http://www.warmwell.com ..."
"Several
regular websites proved useful, but for thousands trying to follow this crisis,
easily the most valuable, by posting a complete daily press summary, scientific
and veterinary papers and all kinds of other data, has been www.warmwell.com
Countryside Alliance
" warmwell.com ..an amazing labour of love...It has an
extraordinarily complete, very up-to-date 'library' of daily news cuttings,
reports, inquiry submissions and visits, Hansard speeches, letters from
individuals, etc, etc" "..an
invigorating and bold adventure.."
Please do visit warmwell.com and communicate your
views. All emails are answered and the
site aims to give a voice to everyone with something to contribute.
Warmwell is an independent website,
set up near the beginning of the Foot and Mouth crisis in 2001, and has been updated nearly every day since. It is unfunded (except that I accepted, in July/August 2005, small donations towards the previous four years' technical webspace costs. ) Warmwell.com has no political or commercial affiliations of any kind. It does, however, provide a platform for ordinary people who have something relevant to say. (Contact by email )
| "So there you have it: the research, it seems, was wrong, the science was outdated, the slaughter unnecessary, the policy unethical, and the strategy ineffective. Apart from that, things seem to have been just fine. " Magnus Linklater April 26 2001 "...'normal' will never mean the same again after we turned to our ministry for help and were rewarded with inefficiency, appalling and ignorant ministry vets, inept, bungling soldiery and slow, draconian, insensitive bureaucracy." | "Some of the worst bits of decision-making that I have seen in my six years as an MP have been due to speed. I think the worst case of all was the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Everything happens very fast: it is in the run-up to a General Election, there is a lot of evidence out there, people have done studies about vaccination versus mass culling, but there just is not the time. It is about who gets to the Prime Minister's ear first and how you respond to tomorrow's headlines. As a result some awful decisions were made and it cost billions of pounds. .." Dr Vincent Cable MP from a transcript of a talk at ODI 7th May 2003 |
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Two Minute Silence - in 2006, the 5 year anniversary of the infamous Contiguous Cull policy
"In the name of veterinary disease control, we were about to embark on the greatest unnecessary slaughter of healthy animals in the history of our profession. It cost £10 - 12 billion and involved the slaughter of 10 million animals...." Bob Michell, BVetMed BSc PhD DSc MRCVS, Former President of the RCVS
The 2001 epidemic, often glibly described as the world's worst FMD epidemic, was only the "worst" in terms of costs. Financially, £10-12 billion pounds is a conservative estimate. The numbers of animals and carcasses destroyed was in millions. BUT as far as the number of farms infected is concerned, and number of animals infected, it was a less serious epidemic than the 1967 UK FMD epidemic.
The costs - including an estimated 60 farmer suicides, widespread rural misery and health problems and consequences for the rural economy- were due in large measure to the insistence by MAFF/DEFRA on assuming a centralised control of slaughtering without proper veterinary input (for which the RCVS must surely take some blame for its spineless acquiescence). The cost of the infamous application of computer modelling and the "Contiguous Cull" policy by which all ruminants and pigs on premises (including rare breeds, irreplaceable genetic lines and children's pets) within 3 km of an infected farm were summarily slaughtered - has never been calculated. No acknowledgement of the mistakes made has ever been forthcoming .
Background to FMD policy The UK refusal to accept rapid diagnostic equipment and vaccination. See pages on the technology that should have been used in 2001 - and was not. As many said at the time and continue to say years later,
- "Why exactly do we tolerate the catastrophic effects of FMD, bovine TB and other major plagues of the world's livestock? It is not for lack of technology to eliminate them."
Its main purpose
as well as providing a daily commentary on matters having a connection with animal health or welfare or legislation from the perspective of an independent onlooker, is to provide an archive of information about the Foot and Mouth epidemic 2001. In particular, the site presents material about FMD papers, research, technology and vaccination and about developments in animal disease control measures. * Up to 85.6% (over 5 million if one accepts official figures) of the animals slaughtered in the UK 2001 FMD epidemic
were not infected nor incubating the disease at the time of slaughter.
There is no evidence to show that the target of slaughter of infected premises within 24
hours of clinical diagnosis was ever achieved.
It is highly likely that delays in slaughter
explain why 2001 UK FMD epidemic was not brought under control once movement
restrictions and biosecurity measures were imposed.
There has been no public inquiry into the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic and its handling.
We feel this is a mistake since, in spite of the excellent and independent local inquiry in Devon (full report can be seen here (external link), two Royal Society reports and the Anderson Inquiry, there seem to have been few lessons learned. Many of the same people hold the same (or more) influential positions now as then. In spite of its name change and money spent on a new logo - MAFF/DEFRA seems still to be much the same now as it was then.Dr. Paul Kitching, (still head of the foot-and- mouth division Pirbright at the time of the outbreak but now at the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg) said the computer models were based on "a total suspension of common sense." The British government compounded the crisis by following bad advice on how to handle the outbreak. It was heading into an election. It ignored the recommendations of international experts such as Professor Fred Brown and those of its own Animal Health Laboratory at Pirbright and decided to act on the Imperial College computer modellers' predictions that the disease would run out of control for many months.
The UK authorities continue to assert that, in addition to animals infected with FMD and their dangerous contacts, so-called pre-emptive "contiguous" culling during the 2001 FMD crisis was necessary. We still hear the same argument: these animals cannot be termed "healthy" animals, they were very likely to have been incubating the disease.
However, had they really been incubating foot and mouth disease it would have been obvious at the time of slaughter. Delays in slaughter times meant that the disease had time to develop and show clinical signs if it was going to develop at all. But there were no clinical signs in the majority of farms culled.
Many of these pre-emptive culls (40%) took place around "IP"s where no laboratory evidence was found ( Pirbright maintained throughout the epidemic that their laboratory testing was at least 90% accurate. )
The modellers' predictions about likely infection were subsequently found to be very inaccurate. As reported in October 2001 in Nature 4/10/2001 vol 413, when the epidemic data was re-analysed in July, the Imperial team found that the spatial relationship between index cases and secondary infections was not as they had previously believed. They had overestimated the risk of exposure on contiguous farms. It was to prove a tragic and heartbreaking mistake - and one for which there has never been an apology.
"We cannot have a situation again where there is no clear-cut policy on whether and when vaccination is used"
From the Key Recommendations of the Report of the Public Accounts Committee into the 2001 Outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease" In the post 9/11 world, we are forced to develop an alternative to depopulation. We simply can not kill livestock faster than terrorists can infect them with FMD virus."
( 2005) Four years ago, bewilderment and frustration at tactics used against those trying to defend their rights from a bureaucratic, unscientific and frightening nonsense created warmwell.com.
"This is the real world, not Disney World," sneered an English policewoman who pushed her way into a private house to help slaughter Carolyn Hoffe's five healthy pet sheep in 2001. We were appalled at this "real world". So were many others.
A very angry article about the foot and mouth crisis was published on May 27 2003 in the Western Morning News (See below). It illustrates well how people who suffered are still feeling - and how very far from receding into the past is the experience of FMD 2001.
from warmwell May 28 2003 ~
"GOOD REASONS FOR RESENTMENT
"Millions of others were unseen, unsung and uncompensated ..." A very angry article about the foot and mouth crisis was published on May 27 in the Western Morning News. It illustrates well how people who suffered are still feeling - and how very far from receding into the past is the experience of FMD 2001. Extract:- "....Some of the casualties of MAFF ineptitude were obvious - the farming families who were subjected to bullying, brutality, bureaucracy and force majeure and saw their lives' work rotting outside their windows, then going up in smoke. Millions of others were unseen, unsung and uncompensated - the farmers isolated and starved of accurate information, unable to trade or to move stock for month after month; the animals thus stranded in mires without fodder; the children subjected to ineradicable trauma; the many, many small, struggling, agriculture-related industries.
And when it was all over? It wasn't all over. It continues to this day. Hobbled businesses stagger into bankruptcy. Farms deprived of income for all that time are sold, having never recovered. One of the "lucky" victims, Bruce Ayre, who had 2,500 sheep and 250 cattle killed, said yesterday: "We're just getting back to normal now, and 'normal' will never mean the same again after we turned to our ministry for help and were rewarded with inefficiency, appalling and ignorant ministry vets, inept, bungling soldiery and slow, draconian, insensitive bureaucracy." (More)
From Senseless Slaughter by Emma Tennant
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"....Who had devised the extraordinary three-kilometre cull of healthy animals? We were not told, but it was enthusiastically endorsed by the Minister of Agriculture, Nick Brown, by Professor King, and by the team of Imperial College epidemiologists, headed by Professor Roy Anderson, who were calling the shots. None of them had any previous experience of FMD. The FMD specialists and the virologists had been sidelined. The cull policy was a bizarre experiment which had never been tried before; a strange way indeed of dealing with what became the worst epidemic the world had ever seen.
We talked to farming friends in France, Germany and Africa. They were appalled and astonished by what they heard, and saw on television. Had Britain, famed for its love of animals and veterinary expertise, gone mad? ..."
In the foot and mouth crisis of 2001, warmwell's view of what was happening to farm animals and stockholders was very different from what the official line was trying to present. We considered it a national catastrophe. More than four years on, with no official apology and no genuine public enquiry, we have become interested in many linked issues.
Domestic violence, road rage, binge drinking and disillusionment are the symptoms of a deeper illness. Global warfare, some of it carried out in our name and in the name of "democracy", is a sign of the insanity that abounds today. Politics has invaded people's lives - and most people feel so powerless that there is, understandably, less and less interest in politics. Terrorism is a vicious circle of violence and fear in which the underlyng issues of poverty, frustration and powerlessness have become forgotten and remain unaddressed.
George Orwell's 1945 essay on empire and nationalism rings very true today :
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"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage - torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians - which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
- Summary of the Recommendations of the Royal Society Inquiry into Infectious Diseases in Livestock
- Cumbria Foot and Mouth Disease Inquiry - One of the three County Council FMD Inquiries, chaired by Professor Phil Thomas. Report released September 2002. Site contains the full 120 page report, including the recommendations.
- Devon Foot and Mouth Disease Inquiry - One of the three County Council FMD Inquiries, chaired by Professor Ian Mercer CBE. Report released January 2002. Site contains the full 100 page report, including the recommendations.
- Northumberland Foot and Mouth Disease Inquiry - One of the three County Council FMD Inquiries, chaired by Professor Michael Dower. Report released February 2002. Site contains the full report, including the recommendations.
- Policy Commission On The Future Of Farming And Food - Announced 9 August 2001. Final report issued on 29 January 2002 as one of the three FMD Inquiries. Includes meetings, responses and the report.
- Royal Society Inquiry into Infectious Diseases in Livestock - Announced 9 August 2001 as one of the three FMD Inquiries. Chaired by Sir Brian Follett FRS. Summary Report released July 2002. Includes progress reports, commissioned papers and evidence.
Aug 21 2004 ~ An email following Roger's..." I didn't think FMD and what we all went through could still make me cry... then I read Roger's e - mail... he is right, so many people still do not realise the horror we were subjected to. I still find myself talking to people who had no idea, but there does seem to be a greater willingness to listen and understand now that Blair has been exposed ... through the Iraq debacle." Aug 21 ~ "I am so sorry. I didn't know what was going on... we thought that you'd gone mad." When asked why we continue to "bang on about" foot and mouth 2001, I suggest directing the questionner to Roger's email here. |
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